Washington’s combined tribal economies now generate annual revenues in the billions of dollars, elevating many tribes to major-player status in their communities.

Tribal casinos alone generated an estimated $1.6 billion in net receipts last year, and gaming is only one of an increasingly diverse array of tribal business ventures in Washington state.

Long associated with natural resources industries, tribes and their members are moving into such nontraditional lines of business as commercial centers, specialty retailers and other kinds of hospitality enterprises.

To be sure, many tribes struggle with economic development, often because of rural locations, tight credit, and tribal governments that encounter problems in setting direction.

But many other tribes have surmounted those challenges, and a new generation of tribal members is well-schooled and experienced in matters of finance and law, making business ventures even more accessible.

“I see a new breed of people out there who are not risk averse,” said Quanah Spencer, an attorney at Seattle law firm Williams Kastner, and a member of the Yakama and Klickitat tribes. “They know how to seek capital, how to get capital, how to put that into operations and make a profit.”

“You didn’t see that 10 years ago,” he said.

Indian Country in Washington state is many countries, with different business mixes and current conditions. The Tulalip Tribes’ Quil Ceda Village, just off Interstate 5 near Marysville, has more than 100 stores and an expanded casino resort.

In Eastern Washington, the Colville Tribal Enterprise Corp. shut down a sawmill and a plywood mill in 2009, when the housing crash killed demand for lumber. The shutdowns caused about 400 layoffs, representing nearly half of the tribal enterprise’s employment, said corporation CEO Joe Pakootas. Those mills remain closed.

Reservation jobless rates vary greatly. Unemployment can be as high as 45 percent on rural reservations, said Michael Verchot, director of The Business and Economic Development Center at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. But the numbers are much closer to full employment for reservations with urban casinos, he said.

Tribes are significant contributors to the state economy. Tribal enterprises and entrepreneurs in 2004 generated $3.1 billion in revenue in 2004, according to a 2006 study funded by the Washington Indian Gaming Association.

A challenge is keeping that money on the reservations, said the study’s author, Jonathan Taylor, the Harvard-educated president of Taylor Policy Group in Sarasota, Fla.

“One problem that a lot of reservations have is that everyone spends their money off the reservation,” he said. “The tribes are trying to work out how they can get more individual citizens developing on-reservation businesses.”

Tribal casinos have been a big source of new revenue in recent years, especially for tribes located near metro areas and along major highways.

But casino revenues could be nearing a plateau, said Rick Day, gambling commission director. He projects flat gaming revenues for 2010.

As a result, many tribal officials are monitoring their casinos’ performance while looking for ways to diversify their business lines. For many tribes, casino windfalls have paid for social services, including new health clinics and schools. With those facilities and programs in place, some tribes are now looking for other investment opportunities.

“What’s really interesting to watch is how many of the tribes that have a viable and profitable casino are moving into other ventures,” said the University of Washington’s Verchot.

In Pierce County, the Puyallup Tribe’s Marine View Ventures, a tribally chartered entity, wants to generate more income from the tribe’s land in the Tacoma area while respecting the Puyallups’ historic values.

“Gaming is a maturing industry, and many other leaders are looking to ventures like Marine View Ventures to diversify their portfolios so they can provide an alternative stream of income or revenue back to the tribe,” said Marine View Ventures CEO Chad Wright, a tribal member.

One of the tribe’s goals is to generate the revenue needed to buy more land. The tribe currently owns about 500 acres on its 18,000-acre reservation.

Wright seems sanguine about the shipping downturn that hammered the Port of Tacoma and temporarily cooled demand for a 200-acre intermodal terminal on tribal land at the port. The terminal would be operated by a joint venture between the tribe and Seattle-based SSA Marine.

The joint venture won’t get all its permits until early 2011, at which point marine traffic may be turning up again, Wright said.

At the University of Washington, an intern with the Foster School of Business last year developed a business plan for a fish processing plant on the Columbia River that will add value to the catch for the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Yakama tribes, which together operate the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, based in Portland. That facility could open in the fall of 2011, with the goal of keeping revenue from packing and value-added selling within the tribes, as well as creating products with stronger tribal identities, said Commission Finance Director Jon Matthews, a member of the Nez Perce tribe.

“We’ve worked really hard to increase the economic return on the catch,” he said. “A lot of tribal members want to be sure their sons and daughter and grandchildren continue this catch.”

Another UW intern worked with the Quileute Nation, located at LaPush, on the Olympic Peninsula, to develop an online site to sell products capitalizing on the “Twilight” series of books and movies. The plots were partly based on the reservation, although the movies were filmed elsewhere.

In March the Quileutes launched a new website designed to market traditional Quileute products as well as merchandise linked to the “Twilight” series, said Jackie Jacobs, owner of the J Talent Group, which contracted with the tribe to create the site. Jacobs is a member of the Lumbee Nation of North Carolina, and her company focuses on American Indian clients.

Amid all of the new tribal business ventures, many members still prefer traditional pursuits, such as fishing, shellfish harvesting and forestry.

But the tribes have had to be adaptable with their natural-resource businesses. Because of smaller salmon runs in Puget Sound, the tribes’ share of the state’s salmon harvest is now less than $12 million after peaking at $39 million in 1987.

To compensate, tribal members moved into harvesting shellfish, also a traditional endeavor, with those revenues climbing to $37 million in 2009 from $62,000 in 1980.

Most Washington reservations are rural, and for the 40 percent of the state’s 150,000 American Indians who live on reservations, plugging into the new economy can be challenging, said Craig Bill, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Indian Affairs, and a member of the Swinomish Tribe.

One private-sector company that’s getting traction is Sister Sky, a small manufacturer of body lotions, shampoos and soaps featuring traditional native botanicals, backed by an attractive website complete with a blog.

The company operates 45 miles north of Spokane on the Spokane Indian Reservation. CEO Monica Simeon expects her company to continue last year’s double-digit growth by doubling sales this year, as she partners with companies around the country. Sister Sky’s sales last year were about $600,000. The company has three employees and about six interns.

“We really want to grow the company beyond just Indian Country,” Simeon said. “We really want to be a mainstream brand.”

Creating new enterprises requires capital, and this continues to be a challenge in Indian Country.

Casinos solved the issue for many tribal governments by being a source of money for tribal enterprises, such as the Tulalip Tribes’ commercial developments, the Jamestown S’Kallam Tribe’s health clinic and golf course, and the Puyallups’ planned intermodal terminal.

But the legal landscape on reservations means that some tribal members with houses can’t use them as collateral for starting small companies, a typical source of small-business capital. On the reservation, this worsened the credit crunch that choked off small business expansion nationwide after the financial panic of 2008.

Tribes have long grappled with tight credit on their reservations. One response is the Indian Country Initiative of ShoreBank Enterprise, an Ilwaco-based nonprofit that specializes in supplying credit for minority small businesses.

Since its inception three years ago, the initiative has given 10 loans, some as small as $40,000, for a total of $11 million to tribal entrepreneurs, said Chandra Hampson, vice president and director of the initiative. The loans lead to investments in such things as fishing boats, a cedar salvage operation, a canoe builder and an environmental remediation company.

A descendant of the Winnebago Tribe with an MBA from the University of Washington, Hampson sees her work as an important step in the evolution of tribal economics, and a necessity if tribes are to keep hard-earned dollars from flowing off reservation.

“This is a critical time ... when tribal governments are becoming more sophisticated in the economic conditions they create on the reservation to support the growth of the private sector,” she said. “If there’s no capital to fund those enterprises as opportunities come up, they’re not going to be able to pursue them.”